“As for those in the quarries, the Syracusans handled them at first but ungently; for in this hollow place, first the sun and suffocating air (being without roof), annoyed them one way; and on the other side, the nights coming upon that heat, autumnal and cold, put them (by reason of the alteration) into strange diseases. Especially because for want of room they did all things in one and the same place, and the carcases of such as died of their wounds, or vicissitudes of weather, or the like, lay there in heaps. Also the smell was intolerable, besides that they were afflicted with hunger and thirst. For for eight months together they allowed them no more but to every man a cotyle[157] of water by the day, and two cotyles of corn: and whatsoever misery is probable that men in such a place may suffer, they suffered. Some seventy days they lived thus thronged. Afterwards retaining the Athenians, and such Sicilians and Italians as were of the army with them, they sold the rest. How many were taken in all, it is hard to say exactly; but they were seven thousand[158] at the fewest. And this, in my opinion, was the greatest action that happened in all this war, or at all, that we have heard of among the Grecians, being to the victors most glorious, and most calamitous to the vanquished. For being wholly overcome in every kind, and receiving small loss in nothing, their army and fleet, and all that ever they had, perished (as they used to say) with an universal destruction. Few of many returned home. And thus passed the business concerning Sicily.” A pleasing anecdote, related by Plutarch, relieves in part the fate of these unhappy men. Many Athenians, who fell into the hands of private masters, found the means of procuring kinder treatment by recitations of the masterpieces of literature, with which the minds even of the poorest Athenians were usually stored; especially the tragedies of Euripides, the favourite dramatic poet of the Sicilian Greeks. Many are said to have visited him on their return to Attica, to own themselves indebted to him for liberty, granted as a recompense for communicating what they recollected of his works. This is strong testimony to the scarcity of manuscripts, and the consequent value of knowledge to its possessor. The same cause enabled these captive Athenians to purchase freedom, and the philosophers and sophists to reap such golden harvests from their lectures; literature was entirely dependent upon oral communication.